The NAACP’s National Board of Directors will vote Saturday on an anti-charter-school resolution. Its passage would betray the group’s founding principles.
The resolution calls for a national moratorium on K-12 charter schools — which are freeing 700,000 African-American children from the tyranny of failed public-school systems.
Here in New York, charter public schools have been transformational — with children in the worst-performing school districts achieving proficiency in math and English. Nearly half the city’s top 20 public schools for grades 3-8 are charters, whose students are predominately black and Hispanic.
Charters are leading the way to a better future — yet the NAACP threatens to denounce progress rather than embrace it.
The resolution reads like teachers-union propaganda, including the lie that charters increase racial segregation. Bizarrely, it even equates charter-school operators with subprime predatory lenders — as if offering inner-city kids a good education is exploitation.
The measure is correct in that charters would change the control of US public education — but it doesn’t admit that it’s union power that’s threatened. Teachers unions oppose all reforms that challenge their monopoly, seek to hold teachers accountable or focus on educating America’s children to the highest standards.
Sadly, the New York delegation will mainly support the resolution — because the local NAACP is already a pawn of the United Federation of Teachers.
Nationally, the NAACP is already seen as musty and out of step with millennials — and distant from the citizens most harmed by failure-factory schools.
Tens of thousands of black families are on charter-school waitlists nationwide. Does the NAACP truly mean to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep them out?
Charter public schools are the only education reform of recent decades to offer real results in closing the racial achievement gap.
If the NAACP opposes the single best solution to educational inequality in minority US communities, it will be turning its back on its own proud history of advocating for the advancement of African-Americans.